NYU.edu requires JavaScript be enabled in your browser in order to use important features of the site. JavaScript is either disabled or not supported by your browser. For instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser, click here.

Main Navigation

Bread Crumbs

What the recent U.K. Riots indicate about the U.S. Political Scene, including the Occupy Wall Street movement - Oct. 14

October 11, 2011

As a key architect of the U.K.’s Big Society project, Phillip Blond will apply lessons from the recent U.K. riots to our American political scene, including the current Occupy Wall Street movement, in a presentation he will deliver on Friday, October 14, at New York University, starting at 4:00 p.m. Blond’s ResPublica has ridden to sudden prominence with radical solutions aimed at restoring civil society, re-moralizing the marketplace, and recapitalizing the poor. The think tank’s ideas make up a substantial part of the United Kingdom’s new Localism Bill, now close to passage.

Sponsored by NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, the talk, entitled “The Broken Society vs. The Big Society,” takes place in Room 808 of NYU”s Kimmel Center for University Life, 60 Washington Square South, corner of LaGuardia Place, New York, N.Y. The event extends from 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.

Blond is a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge, a student of John Milbank, and a former lecturer in theology at Cumbria. He has been called the "Philosopher King" of the David Cameron government and espouses what might be described as a neo-distributist approach to politics with cooperatives, localized "non-state mutualism" and other policies that do not fit neatly in any of the current political boxes. He offers a critique across the board of the centralized state, big business, banking, and the unregulated free market, and calls for a renewal of morality in the market and the institutions of society. British Prime Minister Cameron's "Big Society" is an attempt to try these ideas in the laboratory of a real country.